Democracy can check our worst instincts — if we let it
A relentless craving for relative superiority still threatens the American experiment.
Donald Trump’s rise to power has coincided with another rise: that of popular interest in the collapse of the Roman Empire. But the potential of populist demagoguery to precipitate a breakdown of democratic order isn’t the only striking echo of Roman history in the United States today. Both Roman and American societies were built on foundations of slavery and the maintenance of a permanent underclass — a precarious and cruel stability that depended on the majority’s sense of relative superiority to the minority, and a fear of that superiority being taken away.
In America, this human foundation created and perpetuated what Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, calls the “narrative of racial difference” that persists to this day. The fear of that difference dissipating, and the resentment such fear provokes, paved the way for a President Trump.
Trump, after all, rose to political relevance with the racist birther movement. His race-baiting campaign was premised on restoring white Americans — the “forgotten men and women,” the “silent majority” — to their rightful place in a zero-sum world that pitted different tribes against each other in a struggle for relative superiority. In Trump’s victory it was, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, “as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, ‘If a black man can be president, then any white man — no matter how fallen — can be president.’” Promise of superiority restored. America made great again.
The Trump campaign didn’t invent this zero-sum worldview. As historian Tom Holland observes in Rubicon, for centuries the Roman republic existed on the backs of slaves, who not only sustained its economy but also fulfilled “a subtler, more baneful need.” In the republic, Holland writes, “all status was relative. What value would freedom have in a world where everyone was free?” In other words, “even the poorest citizen could know himself to be immeasurably the superior of even the best-treated slave.”
Among the many consequences of the human tendency to see the world in zero-sum terms is a constant, relentless measuring of ourselves relative to others around us. People are loss averse, meaning we’d rather not lose something (like status) than gain something. We’re also last-place averse, so we’re generous until we’re not, until we find ourselves in second-to-last place, fearful of tumbling further. We’re determined to maintain our relative status.
That status, while entirely fictional and self-imposed, is deeply entrenched. As Yuval Noah Harari observes in Sapiens, “it is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable.” For any number of reasons, he writes, “complex human societies seem to require imagined hierarchies and unjust discrimination.” In earlier chapters of human evolution, these instincts and tendencies may have served us well. (One of Harari’s main arguments in Sapiens is, in fact, that humankind’s ability to organize itself around an imagined order is what enabled it to build complex civilizations.)
In America, however, these traits have been exploited for generations by an established class that is largely white, male, and wealthy to preserve its status, primarily by appealing to working-class whites’ sense of relative superiority. As a result, as Carol Anderson writes in White Rage, throughout every chapter of this country’s history, “black achievement, black aspirations, and black success [have been] construed as direct threats.” The presidency of Barack Obama was only the latest example.
Our tendency, as individuals and groups, to seek relative superiority is both a design flaw and a shortcoming for which we bear deep responsibility. Nowhere are its consequences more glaring than in an America that remains unwilling to confront its legacy of racial injustice. It’s not just Donald Trump. Mass incarceration and our lust for punishment — and our societal aversion to rehabilitation — are similar manifestations of that desire for a feeling of relative superiority.
Yet the same founders of American democracy who built a nation that entrenched white supremacy, many of whom themselves owned slaves, also built a system of representative government capable of tempering the “fickleness and passion” of the electorate and checking and balancing its worst instincts.
In a democracy, we can choose to elect leaders and empower institutions as a form of self-arrest. Institutions are led by human beings with human failings, but with the consent and participation of the governed, they can help us fight our worst instincts. That fight can take many forms, some more realistic than others: Fighting voter disenfranchisement and increasing access to the polls. Building organizations that register and turn out voters. Attacking gerrymandering in the courts and state legislatures. Supporting good journalism. Making government more efficient. Reforming the electoral college. Dismantling structural barriers to equal opportunity.
It’s on us to transform a democratic infrastructure that rewards fearmongering and perpetuates injustice into one that encourages moderation and makes it more likely that our better angels will prevail.
In Rubicon, Holland quotes the Roman philosopher and former slave Publilius Syrus, who advised that “gain cannot be made without loss to someone else.” That remains the governing philosophy and worldview of Donald Trump. If, as expected, his administration continues its flirtation with zero-sum authoritarianism, we’ll continue to see the fate of the Roman republic as a cautionary tale. But perhaps rather than looking for parallels in what brought Roman society down, we should look for lessons in what was tolerated to prop it up.